Crypto is under attack, but we will be victorious! (Weekly crypto updates)

I am back with the crypto-market updates and this week is was hot, especially in Canada (sorry for you guys, must be hard in there). There are plenty of things between Sun and Moon, but no opportunity like Helium and Luna. There is a concerned FUD directed to small investors, exchanges like Binance and a lot of fake concern about how bad is 'this' crypto stuff. Let's see the news!

• Bitcoin - Third richest man in Mexico, Ricardo Salinas, called BTC the ''new gold'' and recomended as investment instead of devaluating fiat currencies. BTC started the week at 35k, but, according to Glassnode, the demand for BTC is slowing down lately. I think this is good, once everyone for their bags full, the price will not be artificially kept at low levels and it will start to go up. There is still some selling pressure and potential decline in the middle of Jully, but after that we hope the only way is up. Overall we are looking at a 40% price loss in the April-June period in 2021, as opposed to 42% increase in 2020 and the 157% in 2019. Also, BTC active addresses went down from 1.3M to 0.5M per day. Morgan Stanley bough 28.000 Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. InUS, in a deal with NYDIG, 650 banks and credit unions will be able to offer BTC to 24 millions customers. 
• Ethereum - ETH reached $2000 on Monday, starting to recover. For the 3rd time this year, ETH had more active addresses than BTC on 5-6 June, around 200k more, to be more precise. 
• Altcoins - Elon Musk has now a Shiba Inu dog called Floki. Better than English Royal dog named Pula. Romanian people will understand this. Anyway, Shiba Inu token increased 17% and Dogecoin did not move not even 1%. Did Elon lost his Midas touch? Good! I will still wish him Happy Birthday, but man, just stop tweeting nonsense please. Coinbase got a new savings crypto added, USDC, with 4% per year. Just remember that, while this looks like a savings account, it is not, you just lend your USDC, but there is no protection in place in case of bankruptcy. Some other interesting additions on the market, with Nexo adopting Cardano (ADA), Bitcoin Cash ABC is rebranded eCash, moving to Proof of Stake consensus and reducing the denomination from 8 to 2 decimals. Really? If you have Terra (LUNA), they got staking now, on the LUNA Mainnet, and the price is continuosly increasing. Get in there, buy some Luna, thank me later. Also, governance tokens are gaining traction, and more likely they will increase in value in the following months, or maybe years. Proxy wars? Bring them on! Helium is looking to create a global wireless network, operated and owned by users. That being said, my Helium miner was a bit dissapointing last month, with only 1.2 HNT mined (around 15$). 
• NFTs - Splinterlands, the NFT blockchain game on Hive had the account banned on Twitter our of nothing. Along with some other big names in NFT area. As a coincidence, right after this, Twitter launched a NFT collection of some sorts. Looks like they are trying to get rid of the competition. Ntz Ntz naughty Twitter! Pretty expensive  140 NFT on Ethereum, with the likes of Justin Sun buying them, probably. Talking about Splinterlands, they just launched a new system of renting your NFTs via smart contract, so, more money to be made in there. The inventor of Internet, Tim Bernet, chose a goot time to create a NFT with the source code of the internet, and apparently there was a mistake in the code, but this raised the price even more. Gary Vee is not playing with NFTs, to be used as tickets for his future events. Axie Infinity is improving every month, and my test gaming in June got me $180 in SLP tokens just by doing the daily quest, but there is more to it, as 2.3M visitors went to their site, the crypto volume went up x3 times more ($128M - 57K ETH) with their new RONIN blockchain feature, instead on ETH mainnet, in a bid to take the fees level down. They are using Ramp as fiat gateway, so, Ramp token may increase over time, if you know what I mean. 

• Good news - India, the crypto investments increased almost x200 from last year until now, despite the negative stance against crypto adopted by the bank establishment. EToro Big Kahuna said in a Financial Times interview that more and more regulators are trying to opposse crypto, as the interest increases, but they will better learn about it and realise that crypto is here to stay. Good man. Did you hear about Worldcoin, they are working on an orb shaped device able to scan your Iris as identifier, instead of the print or face scan. This means to be a bank account replacement, but if the Iris scan device is too expensive, I personally don't see this happen. Coinbase is working an a secret project, a crypto app store, similar with Apple App store, as their CEO said that they do not need to create all the apps needed, just to create the store where you can find them all. 
• Bad news - More and more big names from Federal Reserve, Wall Street and even Feds are realizing that crypto in general, and stablecoins in particular, are a threat to the existing financial system, even if they are trying to create some centralized bank digidal cryptocurrencies (CBDC - the name that you should know and avoid, friends). They are a bit slow, China realized this long time ago, and US CBDC is just a discussion still even now. Also, being a bit naughty, US put pressure on Salvador (indirectly via IMS&CO, and even directly) in order to delay their BTC adoption as one of the main currencies. It is too late, all this stuff cannot be stopped anymore. Binance is under a lot of direct FUD, with Canadian regulators, Japan and UK stopping them to take any regulated crypto activity (derivatives and stonks are regulated), but all the crypto like BTC, ETH and the rest of it are unregulated, so there is no danger in there. Even Thailand seems to join the party, and I think soon Binance will stop doing derivatives in few countries to avoid the bad publicity. At least for now. Couple of days Binance bank withdrawal in UK didn't work, but as for Friday 2nd of July the problem was sorted. After all these, Huobi exchange was a bit proactive, and they stopped trading derivatives to 10 countries, including Canada, US, Japan and few others. UK also. Crypto targeted in cyber-attacks increased in number by more than 190% in the last 12 months. RobinHood was fined $70M for the way they treated their customers during the WallStreetBets initiative. So, they were thinking, bad publicity is still publicity, and they proceed with the public offering of the company (IPO). Just think about this, 34% of their crypto revenue came from Dogecoin trading. How crazy is this? 'Widespread and significant harm suffered by customers' are the words used by the Financial Industry Regulation Authority (FIRA). After the big Africrypt scam, South Africa is looking for a way to adopt a crypto regulation framework, as fast as possible. In US, as always, the right wing groups started to accept funds in crypto, the Financial Action Task Force is telling us. Instead of dollar, how patriotic is this, are you even real American patriots or not? Another Polygon based hack, Safe Dollar, is not so safe now, as its value dropped all the way to zero. Mexico made their position known, as they banned all banks to work with crypto, and the advice was to maintain a healthy distance between these and the financial system. 
• Main adoption - Tom Brady and his wife, Gisele Bundchen are the new brand ambassadors for FTX exchange. If you don't know, Tom Brady also launched a NFT platform called Autograph and a NFT collection lately. Crypto.com is the official partner for Formula 1 racing, with some crypto-prize and even new NFTs proposed for the next season. They start at the British Grand Prix on 17th of July. Coinbase famous coin adoption question list will be made a bit simpler, with only 12 questions left from the previous 70. VISA is getting all revved up, after they hired another 5 crypto specialists for different roles in product management, bussiness development and engineering. They are also testing some product using USDC in the last few months. Switzerland based 21Shares to launch a Solana powered Exchange traded product, after they just raised $300M earlier June. China started to implement their Digital Yuan as a payment to subway and railway in Beijing.
• I discovered DEFI tool used to market your content as content creator. Writting blogs, video blogs, noise.cash, Torum, anything goes well with it. Check this CRE8R APP here. Keep in mind that it is still in the experimental phase, so you may need to wait until its full capacity will be unleashed. 
• And the joke of the day, of course, Bitcoin.org was ordered by the British court to take out the BTC Whitepaper from their website, as requested by the Craig Wright (as he is Satothis Nakamoto), or they will be accused of copyright infringement. Yes, it is happening again. Once more. By the way, who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

That's all for today.

All the best,

George

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